PeopleSoft for the Oracle DBA

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2 PeopleSoft for the Oracle DBA Copyright 2012 by David Kurtz This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher s location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. ISBN-13 (pbk): ISBN-13 (electronic): Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and images only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. President and Publisher: Paul Manning Lead Editor: Jonathan Gennick Technical Reviewer: Wolfgang Breitling and Tim Gorman Editorial Board: Steve Anglin, Mark Beckner, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Morgan Ertel, Jonathan Gennick, Jonathan Hassell, Robert Hutchinson, Michelle Lowman, James Markham, Matthew Moodie, Jeff Olson, Jeffrey Pepper, Douglas Pundick, Ben Renow-Clarke, Dominic Shakeshaft, Gwenan Spearing, Matt Wade, Tom Welsh Coordinating Editor: Anita Castro Copy Editor: Tiffany Taylor Compositor: Bytheway Publishing Services Indexer: SPI Global Artist: SPI Global Cover Designer: Anna Ishchenko Distributed to the book trade worldwide by Springer Science+Business Media New York, 233 Spring Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY Phone SPRINGER, fax (201) , orders-ny@springer-sbm.com, or visit For information on translations, please rights@apress.com, or visit Apress and friends of ED books may be purchased in bulk for academic, corporate, or promotional use. ebook versions and licenses are also available for most titles. For more information, reference our Special Bulk Sales ebook Licensing web page at Any source code or other supplementary materials referenced by the author in this text is available to readers at For detailed information about how to locate your book s source code, go to

3 Contents at a Glance Author s Preface to the Second Edition... xvi Foreword to the First Edition... xvii About the Author... xviii About the Technical Reviewers... xix Acknowledgements... xx Introduction... xxi Chapter 1: An Overview...1 Chapter 2: BEA Tuxedo: PeopleSoft s Application Server Technology...17 Chapter 3: Database Connectivity...37 Chapter 4: PeopleSoft Database Structure: A Tale of Two Data Dictionaries...63 Chapter 5: Keys and Indexing Chapter 6: PeopleSoft DDL Chapter 7: Tablespaces Chapter 8: Locking, Transactions, and Concurrency Chapter 9: Performance Metrics Chapter 10: PeopleTools Performance Utilities Chapter 11: SQL Optimization Techniques in PeopleSoft Chapter 12: Configuring the Application Server Chapter 13: Tuning the Application Server Chapter 14: The Process Scheduler Index iii

4 Contents Author s Preface to the Second Edition... xvi Foreword to the First Edition... xvii About the Author... xviii About the Technical Reviewers... xix Acknowledgements... xx Introduction... xxi Chapter 1: An Overview...1 iv

5 Chapter 2: BEA Tuxedo: PeopleSoft s Application Server Technology...17 Chapter 3: Database Connectivity...37 v

6 Chapter 4: PeopleSoft Database Structure: A Tale of Two Data Dictionaries...63 vi

7 Chapter 5: Keys and Indexing vii

8 Chapter 6: PeopleSoft DDL viii

9 Chapter 7: Tablespaces ix

10 Chapter 8: Locking, Transactions, and Concurrency Chapter 9: Performance Metrics x

11 Chapter 10: PeopleTools Performance Utilities Chapter 11: SQL Optimization Techniques in PeopleSoft xi

12 xii

13 Chapter 12: Configuring the Application Server xiii

14 Chapter 13: Tuning the Application Server Chapter 14: The Process Scheduler xiv

15 Index xv

16 Author s Preface to the Second Edition Within a year of the publication of the first edition, I was regularly being asked when I would produce a second edition. For a long time, I said that nothing had really changed for the DBA. But it has! In seven years, there have been seven major releases of PeopleTools. So many little things had changed that not only was there enough to justify a revision, but it had become essential. In fact, when it came to actually revising the book, I was surprised by just how much I had to change. Some material has been removed because it is no longer relevant in PeopleTools 8.4. Some things have been amended because they are no longer completely true. There is a lot of new material throughout this edition. Some of the new material has been discussed on my blog, but this new edition has allowed me to organize it coherently and put it into context. Two very significant additions relate to performance measurement: When I wrote the first edition, I had not used PeopleSoft s built-in Performance Monitor on a live production system. I have now been using it for several years, and it has become an important tool for analyzing the performance of the on-line part of PeopleSoft applications. I have developed various techniques for working with the data it collects. PeopleTools has used the Oracle database instrumentation package dbms_application_info since PeopleTools At first glance, this might seem to be a very minor change, but it has huge implications. It is now possible to bring a variety of Oracle database performance-analysis techniques to bear on PeopleSoft systems. Even if you already have the first edition, there are still plenty of new ideas to read in this edition. Seven years ago, I wrote the first edition of this book while Oracle was trying to acquire PeopleSoft, and the deal was finally done at about the same time the book was published. Oracle has honored its commitment to continue to develop both PeopleSoft applications and PeopleTools. Today, although some Oracle Fusion Applications are available, companies are still installing and upgrading PeopleSoft systems. It has never been more important than it is today to get the best possible value out of your PeopleSoft system. That requires a fundamental understanding of the underlying technologies. My objective remains not just to tell you what to do, but also why to do it. David Kurtz 2011 xvi

17 Foreword to the First Edition This book should have been written years ago, but then it would not have been as comprehensive as it is today. It bridges the gap between the worlds of PeopleSoft and Oracle, explaining where and how the two sides meet. My own experience with PeopleSoft began in 1992 as the DBA on a GL 1.1/PeopleTools 2.1 implementation project. The DBA is often the only technology-savvy person on such a project, with the rest of the team consisting of functional experts, developers, and, of course, management. As such, the DBA often is tasked with helping to investigate and solve any technology-related problems, even if they have nothing to do with the database. In those early days, one of the big problems was to shoehorn all the pieces of the then client/server application into the first 640KB of a Windows 3.1 client. As a consultant on another implementation project, by now PeopleSoft 5.1, I learned firsthand the performance penalty of the client/server model in a wide area network (WAN) over frame relay, and the distinction between bandwidth and latency. The purchased bandwidth was sufficient for the demand, and that had been all the capacity planners were interested in. However, the accumulated latency of the frame relay network wreaked havoc with the performance. Of course, we were not alone in experiencing this, and in response PeopleSoft added the Tuxedo Application Server as a middle tier. That was when I first encountered David s name. He was the author of a paper titled Advanced Tuxedo that went a long way toward improving my knowledge of the application server and my ability to fine-tune its configuration and administration. The application server is another piece of the growing technology stack in a PeopleSoft implementation that the DBA is tasked with administering simply because he or she is the most knowledgeable person around. Of course, with all the improvements Oracle continually makes to its software, databases these days manage themselves, and it is therefore high time to find something else for the DBA to do. It is interesting how, in this time of the Internet and instant and constant communication, you get to know a person through his work expressed in papers or simply in contributions in newsgroups without ever meeting him. I have not (yet) met David in person, but when I received an asking me if I would consider being a technical reviewer for the book he was writing, I was honored and eager, since I knew it would be a great book. I have only a slight disagreement over the title of the book because I believe it is a bit misleading. PeopleSoft is, by design, database agnostic. Therefore, much of what David explains about how PeopleSoft works with Oracle is also applicable to any other database backend. DBAs with PeopleSoft on DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server, for example, will get many of the same benefits from reading this book. So much for the Oracle part of the title. As I said at the beginning of this foreword, this book bridges the gap between the PeopleSoft and the database worlds. For that reason, I am convinced that PeopleSoft administrators and developers also can learn a lot from what David lays out in this book and discover how some of the decisions they make affect what is happening at the database end. While readers who are new to PeopleSoft will gain the most from the material David presents, even seasoned users will benefit, particularly since the book is up-to-date with PeopleTools What I like most about the book is that it is not a dry rehash of PeopleSoft manuals; rather, it is filled with solid advice and helpful scripts from David s many years of experience. Wolfgang Breitling 2004 xvii

18 About the Author David Kurtz has worked with the Oracle database since 1989, as an Oracle developer and DBA working on assurance, insurance, and actuarial software. In 1996, he joined PeopleSoft, starting out in support. This gave him the opportunity to work out how PeopleTools works and how it interacts with the database. David moved to the PeopleSoft consultancy practice and worked on PeopleSoft customer sites across Europe. In 2000, he set up Go-Faster Consultancy Ltd. ( a company that provides specialist performance and technical consultancy to PeopleSoft users. David is a member of the Oak Table network ( and an Oracle ACE Director. He is a regular presenter at UK Oracle User Group conferences and meetings. xviii

19 About the Technical Reviewers Wolfgang Breitling, born in Stuttgart, Germany, studied mathematics, physics, and computer sciences at the University of Stuttgart. He joined IBM Germany in 1974 in the development laboratory, where he worked in the QA department. One of his tasks was to co-develop an operating system to test the hardware of the /370 model machines developed in Boeblingen, Germany, and Poughkeepsie and Endicott, New York. His first direct foray into performancerelated tasks was a program to test the speed of individual operating codes. After IBM Germany, he worked as a systems programmer on IBM s hierarchical databases DL/1 and IMS for a company in Switzerland before emigrating to his current home in Calgary, Canada. After several years as a systems programmer for IMS and then DB2 on IBM mainframes, he became an independent consultant specializing in administering and tuning PeopleSoft, particularly on Oracle. In the past 20 years, he has been involved in several PeopleSoft installation and upgrade projects. The particular challenges in tuning PeopleSoft caused him to delve into the Oracle cost-based optimizer in an effort to better understand how it works and to use that knowledge in tuning. He has shared his findings in papers and presentations at Oracle user groups and conferences dedicated to Oracle performance topics. Tim Gorman has worked in IT with relational databases since 1984, as an Oracle PRO*C and PL/SQL application developer since 1990, as an Oracle DBA since 1993, and managing/designing very large data warehouses on Oracle since He is an independent contractor ( specializing in performance tuning, database administration (particularly performance and availability), and data warehousing. Mr. Gorman has been a member of the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group ( since 1993 and is currently president; has coauthored five books (three with Oak Table Press); has performed technical reviews on seven more books; is an Oracle ACE; has been a member of the Oak Table Network since 2002; and has presented at Oracle Open World, Collaborate, Hotsos, and local Oracle user groups in lots of wonderful places around the world. xix

20 Acknowledgments You don t get to put your name on the cover of a book without a great deal of help from a lot of other people. My thanks to my technical reviewers, Wolfgang Breitling and Tim Gorman, for reprising their roles in this second edition. Once again their probing questions have led to days of research and experimentation, and many of their insightful comments have been incorporated into the text. Their contribution has been huge. Most important, I want to thank my wife, Angela, for her continuing support and patience while I have found yet another excuse to spend even more time than usual in front of a computer. David Kurtz xx

21 Introduction This book is aimed at helping Oracle DBAs understand and use PeopleSoft technology. For the typical DBA, the introduction to PeopleSoft is likely to include some surprises, not all of them agreeable. Many if not most DBAs have to deal with many different databases, usually supporting different applications. Often they will want to be able to administer all databases in a standard fashion. However, this is not always possible with a PeopleSoft system. Most surprising to Oracle DBAs may be what is missing. In a vanilla PeopleSoft database, there is only minimal use of Oracle-specific features and Oracle-specific SQL constructions. There are no referential constraints. Very few optimizer hints are used, and only where there is no alternative. All PeopleSoft processes connect to the one database schema that contains all the database objects, so security is maintained by the application, not the database. Oracle sequences are never used; instead, sequence numbers are generated using ordinary tables. In order to avoid the use of platform-specific SQL constructions, most of the delivered SQL conforms to a lowest common denominator subset of SQL accepted by the supported RDBMS platforms (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, and Informix). The data model is kept uniform across all platforms, although there are variations in the column data types between platforms. There can be some differences in the indexing between platforms. There is some capability for different code on different platforms in PeopleSoft, but its use in the delivered product is kept to an absolute minimum. Hence, PeopleSoft is sometimes described as a platform-agnostic product. It is my experience that this approach generally does not produce optimal performance. It may have assisted PeopleSoft to manufacture and maintain a single product on many platforms, but it does not help PeopleSoft customers to achieve optimal performance from their systems on their chosen database platform. In PeopleTools 8, there has been some expansion of the areas in which it is possible to introduce database-specific features and code. From PeopleTools 8.1, database triggers were used to write audit records, although these have to be enabled by customization. Database instrumentation was added to PeopleTools Active Data Guard is supported from PeopleTools The other area of confusion for typical Oracle DBAs, particularly those familiar with Oracle s management tools, is that unless certain DBA tasks are incorporated into the application with PeopleSoft s Application Designer, they may be lost. Consequently, this can restrict the effectiveness of generic Oracle administration and monitoring tools. In short, to be effective, DBAs must become PeopleSoft aware. They must work with the PeopleSoft development tools and the application, rather than continually fighting against it otherwise it will bite back! One of the goals of this book is to outline these areas for DBAs, providing workaround techniques where possible. Though primarily aimed at the Oracle DBA who is responsible for maintaining PeopleSoft databases, this book can justifiably claim a wider audience. It bridges the gap between the worlds of PeopleSoft and xxi

22 INTRODUCTION Oracle, explaining where and how the two sides meet. There is plenty of material to interest the PeopleSoft developer. The chapters dealing with the general PeopleSoft architecture and its evolution, and with Tuxedo and WebLogic, will also be of interest to PeopleSoft administrators. Also, is not uncommon for Tuxedo and web server installation, administration, tuning, and troubleshooting to fall to the DBA for lack of other qualified resources. The following is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown summarizing some of the key topics that we will cover: Chapter 1: An Overview. This chapter presents a brief history of the evolution of PeopleSoft and its technology. Chapter 2: BEA Tuxedo: PeopleSoft s Application Server Technology. This chapter explains what Tuxedo is, how it works, and how PeopleSoft introduced Tuxedo into its product. Of all the people concerned with a system, the DBA is most likely to have the skills needed to assimilate this technology. Chapter 3: Database Connectivity. Nearly all the objects in a PeopleSoft database are in a single schema in an Oracle database. This chapter explains how a PeopleSoft database is structured, and how PeopleSoft processes securely authenticate the user and connect to the database. Chapter 4: PeopleSoft Database Structure: A Tale of Two Data Dictionaries. In order to deliver the same application to different database platforms, PeopleSoft maintains its own data dictionary and then uses it to dynamically generate application SQL. This chapter examines the relationship between the PeopleSoft data dictionary and the Oracle database catalogue. Chapter 5: Keys and Indexing. This chapter describes how indexes are defined in the PeopleSoft Application Designer and how that definition is stored in the PeopleSoft data dictionary. Chapter 6: PeopleSoft DDL. This chapter shows how the PeopleSoft Application Designer generates DDL to build and analyze tables and indexes. It also explains to what extent the DBA can adjust that DDL to introduce Oracle-specific features, and when it is necessary to work outside the PeopleSoft design tools. Chapter 7: Tablespaces. This chapter discusses the tablespaces that are created when PeopleSoft is installed in an Oracle database. It also explains how to introduce some modern Oracle tablespace features. Chapter 8: Locking, Transactions, and Concurrency. This chapter explains how PeopleSoft maintains consistency of data without holding database locks for long periods. It also shows how PeopleSoft creates sequences without using Oracle sequences. xxii

23 INTRODUCTION Chapter 9: Performance Metrics. This chapter explains the various sources of performance metrics in both PeopleSoft and the Oracle database, and how to harvest them. Chapter 10: PeopleSoft Performance Utilities. This chapter describes the additional performance instrumentation that has been added to PeopleTools, including the Performance Monitor, which provides a sophisticated wait interface. Chapter 11: SQL Optimization Techniques in PeopleSoft. This chapter describes how to enable Oracle s SQL trace on PeopleSoft processes and, once the DBA has identified SQL bottlenecks, how to apply tuning techniques through PeopleSoft development tools. Chapter 12: Configuring the Application Server. The application server has an intimate relationship with the database, which can affect database and system performance; therefore, the DBA needs to know how to configure the application server. Chapter 13: Tuning the Application Server. This chapter explains how to appropriately size the application server. It also covers other features that can affect system performance. Chapter 14: The Process Scheduler. This chapter describes how the PeopleSoft Process Scheduler is used to initiate batch and report processes. Regulating the batch load has implications for overall system performance. The rate at which new versions of software appear can be bewildering and terrifying. On completion of work on this book, I am using the following software versions: PeopleTools 8.51 Tuxedo 8.1 WebLogic 8.1 Oracle and The good news is that PeopleSoft, and now Oracle, has built progressively on the structures established in previous versions, and many of the underlying principles have not changed. This book does not seek to explain how to administer or tune an Oracle database. Many excellent books and other sources are available on these subjects. Also, if read in isolation, this book will not tell you absolutely everything that a DBA needs to know about PeopleSoft. There are other resources that you should also make use of: xxiii

24 INTRODUCTION My Oracle Support ( This is Oracle s support web site. It gives you access to product support, patches, and additional documentation for all Oracle products including PeopleSoft, Tuxedo, and WebLogic. You will need an account and a password to access this site. PeopleBooks: The PeopleSoft production documentation can be downloaded from Documentation for all Oracle products is also available on-line at PeopleSoft Red Papers: These are technical documents available on the Oracle Support site that discuss how to optimally configure various aspects of PeopleSoft technology. This documentation is good at telling you what to do, but not always why you should do it. PeopleSoft DBA Forum ( This Yahoo group is where PeopleSoft DBAs and other interested technicians discuss ideas, ask questions, and share information. PeopleSoft DBA Blog ( This is my PeopleSoft technical blog. Go-Faster Consultancy ( My web site contains a variety of presentations, papers, and scripts. You ve read the book, now surf the web site. This book has its own web site, which includes the scripts and code examples in the text and any necessary corrections and additions. I started the PeopleSoft DBA Forum ( after a roundtable discussion group at the PeopleSoft EMEA User Conference in It is a moderated forum aimed at the needs of DBAs who administer PeopleSoft systems. It is therefore the perfect place to discuss the subject matter of this book and ask related questions. From time to time in the course of this book, I express my opinions about various things. Those opinions are purely my own and are not necessarily the opinions of any other person or organization. Despite every effort to the contrary, there is no guarantee that the content in this book is errorfree. If you find any errors, please contact me via at info@psftdba.com. xxiv